Re: Worrisome bug trend

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Feb 27, 2007, 20:00 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.63.0702272057220.22628@wbgn013.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de>
In-Reply-To: <7vodnfg4sy.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

Hi,

On Tue, 27 Feb 2007, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> I was reviewing the bugs we fixed since v1.5.0 and noticed almost all of 
> them are ancient ones.  We do have small number of bugs introduced by 
> recently added commands and options, but I see quite a few that are from 
> 2005.

I tend to agree with all the answers that this trend is to be expected.

Especially since we seem to attract more and more users who are unable or unwilling to fix the bugs themselves (up until recently, most bug reports seemed to me to be accompanied by patches).

So, it does not appear worrisome to me.

However, I would like to see people thinking about how to teach "sparse" to catch those kind of errors so that we can actually learn in an efficient way from our mistakes.

For example, I refuse to believe that an error like checking int against ssize_t cannot be found by "sparse".

Ciao, Dscho